


Two Sides

by Circadienne



Category: Star Trek (2009), Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-09
Updated: 2010-01-09
Packaged: 2017-10-06 01:31:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,854
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/48260
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Circadienne/pseuds/Circadienne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Across two universes, things change.  And things don't change at all.  About 4,000 words and the usual expressions of gratitude to <a href="http://cofax7.dreamwidth.org/profile"><img/></a><a href="http://cofax7.dreamwidth.org/"><b>cofax7</b></a>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Two Sides

On one side of the mirror, Uhura's...respectable. Oh, she has her moments, but she has them to herself. When she's on leave. And even then, well, she's sensible. Levelheaded. Married to the job, her sister-in-law says, despairing.

And what if she is, Uhura thinks. It's easier, that way; she's one of the boys, but not really _one of the boys_, and that's how she wants it.

They're her boys. She's very fond of them. And she doesn't want them to treat her like they treat those offworld girls.

That doesn't mean she doesn't go to work looking her best; the tall boots are hot, and she knows it, and when she has to, she uses it.

 

~*~

 

On the other side of the mirror, Uhura waits until grades are turned in and then she tells her instructor that he will be taking her out for coffee, on the first morning of the summer break. He doesn't argue.

There's a cool breeze blowing in off the bay, and she pulls her sweater around her shoulders as they walk uphill into the city. She's in civvies, and he is, too, because they both know that while it's not exactly against regs for a commander to be -- having coffee -- with a cadet, at least not when he's a visiting instructor and no longer directly supervising her, it isn't really smiled upon, either.

She thinks that he's trying to blend in, because he's got that watch cap pulled over his ears, low on his forehead, and he's wearing jeans. But his jacket is off -- split tails in the back, and a high Vulcan collar. The effect is kind of cute, in a dorky way.

"I have inquired about restaurants," Spock says, stuffing his hands in his pockets, "and Lieutenant Hnarhle has recommended a place called Kwai's, which serves dim sum --"

She gives him an appraising look. "I didn't know you liked Earth cooking."

"Bao are very pleasing. And the lieutenant praised a specialty dish with cruciferous vegetables, which should be high in fiber and iron."

She laughs and he looks smug, though he doesn't crack a smile. "Yeah, okay, dim sum sounds good. Though I'm not really worried about the vitamins and minerals."

"I would not expect that you would have to be. You look...very healthy, Cadet Uhura."

"Thank you, Spock," she says gravely, a little grin crinkling the corners of her mouth.

He nods, just slightly, and she tucks her hand in his elbow. He doesn't shrug her off.

After eating -- he's very deft with his chopsticks, but then she'd expect no less from an ambassador's son -- they take the streetcar up through the Presidio and across the big red bridge, then hike into the headlands. The wind off the water's picked up and the salt air is sharp in her nose. There's a dark gray line of cloud offshore, and little wisps of fog are just beginning to whisk up onto the hills behind them, snagging in the oaks and redwoods and sinking down into the canyons.

"Oh, it's beautiful," she says. "I love to come up here."

"It is very different from where I grew up," Spock says, slowly. "I have had to adjust."

"It's not a desert world."

"No, it is not," he says. They watch the waves breaking on the sand, listen to the crash of water, regular and hypnotic. She wonders if it would be awkward if she tried to strike up a conversation in Vulcan, and decides that it might. Even if she could use the practice. So she sits, and he sits, and neither of them says anything. She's read about Vulcans in her xenology courses, but the texts really didn't cover what aliens do on dates. If they even have dates, on Vulcan. This is the stuff they ought to cover, really, at the Academy. It'd be much more useful for most Starfleet personnel than treaty terms and interstellar law. Sure, there was that required training on STD prevention methods, but not a lot about how to _get_ to a point where you'd need to know how to operate an Andorian prophylactic.

The wind is making her eyes water. She wipes at them with one hand. Spock is motionless.

Finally he turns toward her, eyes half-opaque, and she starts back. He blinks rapidly, clearing the inner eyelid, and is again familiar. One corner of his mouth twitches downward, and he says, "I estimate that it will begin raining within thirty minutes. If you would prefer to remain dry --"

"We should go catch the streetcar," she says, recovering.

"Indeed."

He walks her home from the car stop and says good night, rain blowing in on his back as they stand under the little overhang that shelters the door. He clasps her shoulder, keeping her at arm's length, frowns before saying, hurriedly, "It was a pleasant day. I appreciated your company."

"Thank you, Spock. I -- have also had a pleasant day."

A little nod, and he lets go of her and sets off briskly into the rainy evening. She lets herself into the dormitory and thinks, well, I have been on weirder dates. And he's not all grabby, which is nice.

 

~*~

 

On one side of the mirror, she finds herself wedged into a booth in a Marina bar between Jim Kirk and Gary Mitchell. Kirk's finally stopped holding forth on some supposedly-brilliant thing he'd done in Tactics that morning, and Mitchell -- who's had a few too many -- has taken up the slack, going into more detail than any of them really want about the woman he took home last weekend. She catches Miria Cho's eye, across the table, and Miria nods, just a little, so that neither of the men see it. Uhura sneaks a hand into her purse and pings her phone presets; a second later, the loudest ringer on Miria's communicator goes off.

"Oh, I am so sorry, Gary," Miria says, glancing down at the little screen. "Uhura and I have been called in. There's a new transmission that needs our attention."

"At ten o'clock on a Friday night?" he asks, indignantly.

"Duty calls," Uhura tells him, rising, "and it's not ten o'clock or Friday on Romulus."

Kirk waves goodbye, lazily, before turning back to his beer. She thinks that was a wink, but she can't be sure.

They stop in at the little market on the corner for ice cream and the new _Children of Flame_ holo, and sit up late debating whether T'Daral's pregnancy is really Ishufin's baby, or Shiovek's. Miria says she heard that the actress playing T'Daral is actually human, that it's all done with prosthetics, but Uhura finds that hard to believe, with an accent like that.

She finds an excuse the next time Mitchell suggests drinks, and after that he doesn't ask again.

 

~*~

 

On the other side of the mirror, they're about three months into their shakedown cruise when Spock folds himself onto the bench beside her at dinner and asks, his voice perfectly level in the way that she's learned means he's terribly nervous, if she would be interested in learning to play the Vulcan lute.

Uhura raises an eyebrow. "Oh, is that what you call it?"

"I do not know what else I would call it. It is a twelve-stringed instrument, tuned on a -- ah." He stops, looking at her bemused expression. "I assure you, Lieutenant, that my intentions are completely honorable."

"I would never suggest otherwise, Mr. Spock." She is trying very hard not to laugh, but the glass of wine she had before dinner isn't helping.

"I merely thought that, given your excellent auditory abilities, you would be a natural candidate. I have been considering the importance of perpetuating Vulcan cultural traditions, and as I am the second-most-proficient surviving Vulcan lutenist --"

"Who's the first?" she asks, spooning up a bite of stew.

"My father."

She decides she's not going to ask. "Yes, I would be happy to learn. Thank you."

It comes in handy, in a funny way, when the away team is captured by the pirates of Tepping Tshu. As their captors drag them across the courtyard, she hears a familiar voice whistling the first measures of the Ode to Ktha Nialan -- the passage where Shonak collapses -- and promptly hits the deck, taking Kirk down with her. Spock and Sulu's phasers sweep across the courtyard a second later, dropping the pirates, and then the doctor is grabbing their arms, pulling her and the captain to their feet and chanting, "Go, go, go, come on, damn you, go." They race through the gate and away from the transporter dampening field, and as they re-materialize on the Enterprise, she thinks she sees a look of satisfaction cross Spock's face. There's certainly a triumphant smile on hers.

 

~*~

 

On one side of the mirror, she watches her captain and his first officer fighting over a woman neither of them wants, and wonders why they can't admit to each other what's so obvious to everyone else on the ship. Some days, she's sure it's because the Vulcan thinks that sex without procreation is illogical, and other days, she's sure it's because the captain has never slept with anyone he actually likes. Either way, it doesn't make much sense to her.

The Enterprise is sent to Earth, afterwards. The ship is due for maintenance, and unsurprisingly, Starfleet Command takes that as an excuse to stage an inquiry into their sexy little Vulcan vacation; equally unsurprisingly, Kirk and Spock come through it completely unphased. The rest of the crew aren't even called to testify. She wonders why Command even bothers any more. Everyone knows that Jim Kirk is the fleet's golden boy, and that what he wants, he gets, one way or another. But they've apparently got to give the bureaucrats something to do.

Uhura catches the shuttle to Dar two hours after the gavel falls. She tucks her uniform coat up against the bulkhead, leans her head against it, and sleeps most of the way there.

It's early morning when they touch down at the district shuttleport. She walks through half-familiar, just-waking-up streets to her brother's apartment, watching commuters on hoverbikes dodge between drays full of produce from the countryside, shopkeepers cranking down their awnings, schoolchildren tumbling through apartment-house doors and onto the streets, clutching their lunchboxes. It seems like every time she comes back, the city's changed; now and again, she catches a glimpse of a building she knows, or a view, and she can orient herself. Jacob and Fatima moved into their new place four years ago, not long after Noela was born, but Uhura's only been there once. The job makes it hard to come home.

There's a big thing in the service about considering Starfleet as your new family, and she thinks, not for the first time, that this is fine except for how you might like to be part of your old family, too.

Noela bounces into her arms as soon as the door opens, rocking Uhura back on her heels; her big sister Lumuli, shyer, hangs back until Uhura reaches out an arm and pulls her into the hug, clutching her nieces to her. Jacob grabs her as soon as the girls let go, kisses her forehead and whispers, "Oh, I am so glad to have you home, little sister. How long do we get you for?"

"Almost three weeks," she says, wiping her eyes and grinning up at him.

He fixes them breakfast while Fatima calls the girls' school and tells the teacher that their Auntie Nyota from Starfleet is in town and they'll be in tomorrow, but not today.

Uhura takes the girls to the beach every afternoon it's not raining, watches them run and scream in and out of the water, eats the foods of her childhood, buys Jacob a new computer one morning (it's not like she has anywhere to spend her salary, in deep space), and catches up on three years of family gossip.

She lets herself out of the apartment one night, after dinner and most of a bottle of wine, and after walking for an hour or so she's looking across the water at the lights of Zanzibar, glowing aways off. The air is wet, and warm, and smells of salt and the city at her back. The stars and the far-off lights twinkle at her, and she's not sure which of them is home, but she feels content. Restored. Though maybe that's the wine.

Her sister-in-law worries about her, about the risks she's taking. Uhura's mostly all right with that, takes it as the sign of love that it is, though sometimes she wants to turn to the other woman and say, no, look, your choices are yours and mine are mine and they are both -- we are both -- but she doesn't know how to finish that sentence, so she doesn't start it.

The week before she's due to report back to the Enterprise, Fatima sets her up with a co-worker of hers, a guy called Hasheem. Uhura wonders if Fatima imagines she'll fall madly in love and stay in the city, abandon her ship, but she doesn't ask, just says sure, she'd be happy to meet someone. He's sweet, a handsome man with a beautiful smile who takes her to a concert, outdoors, where they eat mishkaki off paper plates and dance late into the night to a deep bass beat.

He asks her to come home with him, leaning in close during a slow song, and she thinks about it -- she really does -- for a minute before she smiles and leans back and says, "I've had a really good time, but you know I'm going back to work next week, and -- "

Hasheem looks disappointed, but he doesn't push the issue. Which is, itself, a little disappointing. Her cot in the kitchen nook feels narrow and hard, that night. She tosses and turns and wishes she were braver, or more foolish, or something other than what she is.

 

~*~

 

On the other side of the mirror, she can tell something's happened when Spock starts disappearing into his quarters in the evenings rather than lingering in the mess, playing his lute or facing down the captain over the chessboard. A week goes by, and then another, and then she finally corners him one morning and says, "Look, we need to clear the air."

He blinks at her and raises an eyebrow. "I was not aware that we were having a dispute, Lieutenant."

"You've been avoiding me, Spock. Avoiding everyone. And don't give me that 'Lieutenant' business."

He won't meet her eyes, and finally, just as the turbolift is about to reach the bridge, he slaps at the controls and brings it to a halt. "I have received word from Ambassador Spock regarding -- regarding my betrothal."

"You're betrothed? I didn't -- she survived?"

"T'Pring was offworld. And I am not betrothed. Not any longer."

"Because?"

He frowns. "She is Vulcan. I am -- not."

Uhura blinks at him. "She won't marry you because you're half-human?"

"Yes." He turns a perfectly still, defiant face toward her. "The Council is encouraging her to find a more suitable mate. From a purely genetic standpoint, I can understand their concerns. We must repopulate the race, and my genes --"

She shuts him up, at that point, as best as she knows how, because she can't stand to hear him go on. After a moment his hand comes up behind her head, his arm reaches around her back, clutching her to him.

When they finally break apart, she punches the button to resume lift service and tugs her dress down.

"I had not realized --" he says, and she answers, "Like hell you hadn't." And then the door slides open and they're on the bridge.

 

~*~

 

On one side of the mirror, aliens kidnap her, take control of her body, and make her kiss the captain. Worse yet, they make it look like she likes it.

When she gets back on board, she strips off the robes they'd dressed her in, throws them in the waste recycler, and stands in the sonic shower, scrubbing herself all over until the timer dings and the computer's voice says, "Attention. You are exceeding your scheduled resource use." It repeats itself, over and over again, until she finally pushes the lever to shut it off.

She and Kirk don't make eye contact for weeks. They are both scrupulously careful to keep things professional, afterwards; it is a long time before she really relaxes around him. Not that he would ever do anything -- she's sure -- but that she is also sure that neither of them would want it to look, to anyone, as though it were even possible that they might want to.

He is her captain, and eventually her friend, but she does not want him to be something else.

 

~*~

 

On the other side of the mirror, Spock comes into her quarters one night while she's sleeping and, with gritted teeth, explains about _pon farr_.

Uhura pulls him down into her bunk, tugging his uniform tunic over his head, and has her way with him. It's hardly the first time. She wishes, at a moment when she should be thinking about something else, that he'd said something before, that he'd thought to explain his body to the woman he's been with, off and on, for years, but -- he's Spock. There's a lot he doesn't talk about.

The next morning, she takes Kirk aside for a quiet word. She and Spock are granted a week's leave on Alpha Centauri; the Enterprise beams them down and then heads off to collect a trade delegation. When Kirk asks over the comm -- the public comm, no less -- if she's sure she doesn't need any backup, she snaps, "Hardly, Captain" and flips the thing off, then tosses it under the bed.

She had expected to get in some sunbathing -- Alpha Centauri has fantastic beaches, down around the equator, miles and miles of shining sand -- but they don't make it out of their hotel room until the fifth afternoon. By then it's raining. Which really doesn't bother her at all.

 

~*~

 

On both sides of the mirror, Uhura spends the better part of a decade as a lieutenant.

She gets back to her quarters late, one night, and finds the blinking light of a waiting private transmission on her console. Must have come in while she was eating; she's sure she didn't push anything personal through earlier in the day. Maybe it's Fatima with news about the baby, she thinks, and hopes for a moment that everything's all right at home.

She leans over, taps the button, and watches as the little screen flickers to life. It's an unfamiliar transit code, and when the sender appears, it's not Fatima -- it's an Orion woman she's never met, in a tidy business suit and elaborate earrings. She thumbs up the volume.

"...with the Historically Disadvantaged Populations Starfleet Officers' Association. I'm calling about a legal action we're pursuing on behalf of member officers who've been repeatedly passed up for promotion, despite their qualifications. Our review of files indicates that you've spent the last eight solar years as a communications officer on the U.S.S. Enterprise -- "

"_Chief_ Communications Officer, thank you very much," Uhura mutters at the screen, but she sits down and listens to the rest of the call. The upshot is that HDPSOA wants to know if she's willing to be a party to the suit they're filing, since, based on her performance record, it's hard to tell what she's still doing on the first ship she was assigned to. Under normal circumstances, she should have been promoted by now, or at least transferred.

The Enterprise is a lot of things, but it's not what you'd call normal circumstances.

She decides that she'll sleep on it, but finds herself in the shower, the next morning, arguing out loud with...herself. She trusts Kirk, and he's always insisted that he's not recommending her for promotion only because he wants to keep her on the Enterprise. That they would be lost without her. He's said it at her last four reviews, that he needs her, can't get by without her, that she's essential. He leans over the table. He's very earnest.

Uhura remembers his eyes, the last time, his sincerity, his conviction that his was the best crew in the fleet. It is hard to argue with a conviction like that. Easier to take pride in it.

She frowns at herself in the mirror, then stretches her mouth, applies her lipstick, and goes to work.

Two nights later, her hand hovering over the console, she finally tells herself to stop being a baby and hit the button already. She feels better, once she's done it; easier to make any decision than none at all.

The HDPSOA response is there when she wakes up. There are forms to complete, and the next time she's home on leave, she stops in at their office on Market Street so they can take a deposition. The lawyer is very polite, straightforward, has a checklist. Yes, her commanding officer has told her that she's qualified for promotion. No, he has not filed Form 8820. No, she has not been subject to demeaning remarks based on her cultural or genetic background. No, she has no reason to believe that she is being refused promotion because of her personal-time activities. Yes, she has had top marks on all her evaluations. No, she has no explanation for why she hasn't been promoted.

Except for Kirk's...whatever it is. Obsession, maybe. Keeping his crew together, and on the Enterprise. One big happy family. All in it together. She doesn't think she has a way to explain how that works, not to this nice young Andorian and the neat notes ke's taking.

Ke shakes her hand, at the end, tells her they'll let her know as soon as they have any news. "Thank you," she says, and "I appreciate it," and she goes back to the Single Officers' Quarters and takes something to help her get to sleep, something that the doctor promised would keep her from dreaming.

Her promotion to lieutenant commander goes through two months after HDPSOA settles the suit, and she takes Starfleet up on the transfer option that comes with it. Because hell, maybe Kirk is right. Maybe this is the best ship in the fleet. But how would she know?

Spock reacts with his usual equanimity, and she can't bring herself to look beyond the calm face. Kirk, well, he talks a lot without really saying anything, and finally winds up with, "And you know, you can always come back here, if you need to. I'll make sure of that, Uhura."

"Thank you, Captain," she says, and leaves it at that.

There's a going-away party, and packing her personals, and then she's standing on the transporter pad with two crates and a potted plant. Her boys are there, behind the shield, and as the familiar hum of the beam starts up, they salute.

She salutes back, and feels herself disappear.


End file.
